The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966)

Original title: Miss Muerte

When somewhat mad neurologist Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) explains his somewhat bizarre theories at a conference, he is laughed and scorned out of the room. Since he explains he has found the parts of the brain that control “good” and “evil”, as well as a way to stimulate or shut them down, so evil will be forever ended, some scepticism shouldn’t come as a surprise here. Still, the good Doctor promptly dies, cause of death: criticism (no, I don’t know how that works, either).

A couple of months later, Zimmer’s daughter and assistant Irma (Mabel Karr) fakes her death in a car accident – hitchhikers are so useful when you need a stand-in corpse – and proceeds with her plans to take revenge on the three scientists she specifically holds responsible for her father’s death. She already has a former killer (Guy Mairesse) suborned by her father’s SCIENCE and his mind controlled nurse as useful helpers, but she decides these men have to die in a more interesting manner.

Being a Jess Franco character, Irma finds herself inspired (and clearly a bit turned on) by the dance choreography of nightclub dancer Nadia (Estella Blain). It’s no wonder, for Nadia’s bit as “Miss Muerte” is all about seduction and murder by freakishly long fingernails, things that resonate with all of us, particularly when we’re planning vengeance. So Irma kidnaps Nadia, puts the mind-control whammy of her father’s SCIENCE on her, somehow poisons her nails, and sends her out to seduce and kill the scientists one by one.

The police, under leadership of a character played by director Jess Franco himself, seem rather confused by the whole thing, but Nadia’s boyfriend (Fernando Montes) – who also happens to be Irma’s short-term flirt and a neurologist himself – seems rather more capable, and certainly more motivated when it comes to uncovering the weird menace plot.

In 1966, Jess Franco was still a somewhat conventional filmmaker, putting some effort into making pulpy horror science fiction thrillers like this one with an audience in mind instead of ascending/descending completely into his world of personal obsessions and perversions. Which in turn means Franco could actually acquire decent budgets to work with. There’s a degree of slickness in Miss Muerte’s black and white photography Franco’s body of work would soon enough lose in favour of the languid, sometimes boring, idiosyncratic phantasmagoria his style would soon enough turn into.

Here, Franco seems to be at an absolute sweet spot between the old and the new. The – somewhat – higher budget inspires him to more concise storytelling, and his love for interesting/weird camera angles is here paired with some wonderful play with shadow and light that often creates as thick of an atmosphere of Franco-ness as his later, more difficult, work.

Many of Franco’s obsessions are there and accounted for: some of his favourite kinks, the nightclub scenes – though there’s no stripping and zooming on crotches here, in fact, very little zooming at all –, his very specific ideas about seduction, dominance and sado-masochism, and many a plot element we’ll encounter again and again in his films. Just here, these kinks seem still to be in service of the pulp horror plot instead of the other way around. From time to time, the film descends into delicious weirdness – the moment where Nadia seduces Howard Vernon’s neurologist character is incredible – but this weirdness still seems controlled.

In fact, Miss Muerte suggests a Franco might have been very effective in subsuming his personal weirdness, at least a little, to make more conventionally accessible yet still highly worthwhile genre movies. Being who I am, I am glad he let his freak flag fly rather sooner than later, but this does not make Miss Muerte any less of an interesting, fun bit of pulp horror.

In short: Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

Original title: Les possédées du diable

Because a mysterious woman named Lorna (Pamela Stanford, making up for her lack of eyebrows with the most extreme eye make-up the 70s have to offer) says so, rich guy Patrick Mariel (Guy Delorme) takes his wife Marianne (Jacqueline Laurent) and his nearly eighteen year old daughter Linda (Lina Romay) to some brutalist looking nightmare city in the Camargue instead of St. Tropez as he promised them. He doesn’t have much of a choice, for Lorna is a demon (or something), and eighteen years ago, Patrick made a pact to beget Lorna’s daughter and future replacement in the soul buying biz on his wife – don’t ask about the technical details, please – in exchange for the usual prosperity and power.

Now, Lorna wants Linda, her kinda-sorta daughter. Patrick isn’t willing to actually give away his beloved daughter to Evil, but he will have little choice in the matter.

In between this, we regularly pop in with a Madwoman (Catherine Lafferière) who likes to wear no panties and rave about Lorna. She’s under the care of a Doctor played by Uncle Jess Franco himself, so I’m sure everything will turn out well for her.

Why she is in the movie at all is anybody’s guess – she might be meant to be just another victim of Lorna jacking up the nudity and writhing quota, or the rest of the film may be her hallucinations. We don’t know, Jess doesn’t tell, as is par for the course with him.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for Jess Franco’s style of bullshit – at least in his films made before 1990 or so – but this movie – decidedly not about an exorcist named Lorna – is a bit of a drag. Despite being on the pornier side of Franco’s output, until its final twenty minutes or so, this lacks the languorous perversity of many of the director’s better films, but keeps the usual tedium. What is laughingly called the plot takes ages to actually reach the point I’ve described above, and there’s not much else going on.

The moments of weird visual poetry that are a large part of the draw of Franco’s films for me are few and far between, and much of the expected copious full frontal nudity with dollops of the macabre feels curiously perfunctory and definitely un-erotic. Lorna really only comes into its own as something of interest in its final twenty minutes or so, when Franco doubles down on the perversity – nothing says class like Lina Romay sucking Stanford’s breast while Stanford repeatedly moans “my daughter! my daughter!”, not to speak of the dildo – and things become a bit more lively than they were before.

For the Franco initiate like me, that’s at least enough to make this supposed attempt to jump on the possession movie bandwagon worth watching once; sane people should probably avoid the experience.

In short: Un silencio de tumba (1972/6)

Movie star Annette Lamark (Glenda Allen) and her entourage go for a weekend trip to a rather pretty island she must have bought quite some time ago. Annette’s sister Valerie (Montserrat Prous) is living there all year round with some rather weird domestics, taking care of Annette’s little son and nurturing quite the hatred for Annette in long, dramatic internal monologues.

Among Annette’s usual group of lickspittles is the detective Juan (Alberto Dalbés), apparently a total hottie, though you might not notice when looking at him.

Soon enough, the kid is napped by someone who demands quite a sum of money. Tempers run even higher and more hysterical now, of course, and things don’t get any calmer once someone sabotages the boat connecting the island to the mainland and starts killing some of these arseholes and fools.

I generally prefer the weirder side of great director Jess Franco, and often tend to find his more conventional movies a bit boring. This very Agatha Christie (though based on a novel by Spanish writer Enrique Jarnes) mystery is actually one of the better among the more mainstream Franco movies, building quite a bit of tension out of the melodramatic clichés, certainly helped by a fantastic bit of overacting by Prous (bizarrely cast as the ugly duckling of the sisters) who really works all of those close-ups of her eyes Franco goes for to maximum melodramatic effect. This is also one of Franco’s genuinely pretty efforts, with many picture postcard shot of the island that makes an effective contrast to the nastiness going on between the characters.

The island setting – and the film’s general lack of porniness – do hamper some of Franco’s stylistic fixations. There’s little room for nightclub sequences (though Jess manages to squeeze a bar and some soft, melancholic guitar playing in), and certainly none for zooming through any woman’s nether regions. If that’s a disappointment or a feature, a viewer probably needs to decide for themselves.

Past Misdeeds: Cartes sur table (1966)

aka Attack of the Robots

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Oh no! International bigwigs are murdered by guys and gals in blackface, wearing what we from a more enlightened age can only describe as hipster glasses! The perpetrators are acting kinda weird, too, as if they were some sort of mind-controlled…robots. They are also losing their black-faces when they get killed.

Interpol finds out that these killers – at least the ones they can get their hands on after their deeds – are all people who mysteriously disappeared before now turning up all minstrel show-y. The only connection between these disappeared is their shared blood group – rhesus zero (scientific fact: the film’s science might be ever so slightly dubious). Some very vague clues point to a charming tourist spot in Spain. Because they really want a rhesus zero blood type kinda guy to investigate things in Spain, and there’s a disturbing lack of them in active service, Interpol rope their former, rhesus as well as brains zero, agent Al Pereira (Eddie Constantine) back in. Al isn’t too happy about the whole thing, particularly because a “Chinese” gentleman with the extremely probable name of Lee Wee (Vicente Roca) wants him to do the same job too, but he’s actually even too stupid to properly say no to anyone, be it Lee or Interpol. Well, at least Al’s pretty good at punching people, and charming the ladies (pheromones, I guess?).

These awesome talents will be put to good use once Al attracts the attention of robot people builders Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion) and Sir Percy (Fernando Rey) and their entourage, as well as the ire of the Chinese, and the interest of one Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy).

I don’t actually know much about French genre films beyond Oughties horror, a bit of 50s swashbucklers, and Jean Rollin, but I do know the French had a – somewhat inexplicable, so I assume comparable to Jerry Lewis – thing for Eddie Constantine, hero of a quintillion of pulpy crime, spy and Godard movies, and not exactly the most inspiring actor ever to come from America, what with his difficulties expressing those “emotions” people talk about so much. One thing Constantine – as far as I know, and as Cartes as well as the Godard connection suggests – really had going for him was that he was clearly game for anything at all, with no unhelpful ideas about personal or thespian dignity. Just like Sir Ben Kingsley, now that I think about it.

Which obviously makes him the ideal lead in this relatively early directorial outing of my favourite Jesus, Jess Franco, because like all Eurospy films Franco made, Cartes sur table quickly turns out to be a Eurospy farce full of bat-shit insane ideas. The film, of course, does not make the slightest attempt to do stupid and boring stuff like tell a sensible, logical story (as if that had much risk of happening in any Franco film) in a sensible logical way, and instead throws bizarre dialogue, weird shit, and various incredibly fake looking but awesome and spirited punch-ups at its audience until it will either run off in a huff, or roll with it laughing and grinning, and having as much of a time as Constantine seems to have. Sure, the man wasn’t a great actor, and I don’t think one of the great low budget charismatics, but he sure seems to enjoy his time on screen so much it’s difficult for me not to share in the fun. So, unlike with Jerry Lewis, the our French neighbours were right.

Having fun with the possibly insane is made to look (and feel) particularly easy by Franco, of course. At this stage of his career, when he actually needed to make movies that didn’t exclusively cater to himself and his obsessions (which I actually love him and his films for, quite a lot), Franco’s films couldn’t quite get away with the full self-indulgence, so this Eurospy comedy can’t spend the time on the moments of leisure and boredom that soon became so important in the director’s films.

Fortunately, this is so early in Franco’s career too, he doesn’t just get bored with the whole affair and shoots some random crap, takes his cheque, and makes three other films with that money. Instead, Franco chooses a classic and simple one damn thing after another approach we, the easily distractible, always will enjoy. Among these damn things are some Franco mainstays, like two (alas only very short) improbable night club numbers of the kind I generally find impossible to describe effectively (because that’s what the movies are for, and I’m not Jess Franco), a main villainess with a bit of a kinky handle on villainous life and a charming dominatrix personality, the inexplicable business with the black-face robot zombie people, bizarre asides like the scene where Constantine finds his hotel room smashed after a Chinese goons versus robot goons fight in his absence, fetches a porter to complain, only to find a perfectly fine room again because the surviving Chinese have – for no reason I could make out, of course – taken it upon themselves to clean up behind themselves once they are alone in the room. All the while, Cynthia watches the proceedings through an absurdly large hatch in the wall. The Chinese only miss two corpses, but what the heck, right? Plus, that gives the film the opportunity for some corpse joke business taking up the next five minutes.


And if that doesn’t convince you Cartes sur table may be slightly atypical Franco but also very fun Franco, I don’t know what could.

The Sadist of Notre Dame (1975/9)

Original title: El sádico de Notre-Dame

(For the Francophiles among my imaginary readers: this write-up is based on the Spanish language cut of the movie)

A man calling himself Mathis Vogel (Jess Franco) is in a bit of a mental state. A former seminary student who was excommunicated after he developed ideas too “radical” even for the Catholic church in their rampant misogyny and outright gibbering madness, he has spent some years in a mental institution before he escaped. Well, presumably escaped, for the subtitles of the film are rough and my Spanish very basic. He is now haunting the nightly streets of Paris around Notre-Dame, murdering sexually open woman and prostitutes (he’s clearly the kind of guy who can’t see the difference there) while ranting in a mix of self-hatred for his own sexual desires, Christian doctrine gone crazy-violent and egomania, internally styling himself as a new grand inquisitor killing all these devilish women come to tempt him/men.

Obviously, there’s just as much self-hatred as hatred of women involved here, and wouldn’t you know it, Mathis isn’t just a killer, he’s also a voyeur as well as a sexual sadist, punishing people who live out the fantasies he is afraid of. When he’s trying to sell a mildly fictionalized manuscript of his deeds to a would-be posh S&M magazine, he stumbles upon the trace of a group that’s particular irresistible to him: a count and countess and their followers and hangers-on who live a swinging sado-masochistic weekend orgy lifestyle with some elements of – staged – Satanism. Basically, it’s everything Mathis must dream of but could never admit to, making for ideal victims.

From time to time, we also pop in with some cops whose investigation is 99 percent sitting around in an office, bickering.

The Sadist of Notre-Dame is a clear and immediate favourite in the large and obsessive body of work of the great Jess – or Jesús if you want to be too precise – Franco. The director isn’t always interested in character psychology, but he’s written himself quite the role here with a deeply disturbed lead character who is obsessive about a lot of the things the director himself was obsessed with but really functions as a dark mirror of these obsessions turned bad by a certain strain of Christianity that sees all things physical as sinful and the resulting self-hatred projected outward.

This mirroring between Mathis’s desires and that of others happens in the plot of the film regularly, too, the killer sometimes re-staging moments of sexual play he has watched (cue many a close-up of one crazed Franco eye), only with the difference that the only penetration he offers is one with a knife. Where the rest of the characters are wont to get each other off, Mathis can only ever conceive of sex as something that must be punished and purged.

It’s pretty obvious political commentary by Franco, offered with the self-irony that comes when a writer/director also casts himself as the villain of the piece.


Visually, this is an often striking film (though shot in the Franco seats of his pants way, so non-Francophiles should probably adjust their expectations), full of moody shots of nightly Paris and its much less pleasant looking day side, with all of Franco’s favourite ways of framing scenes and his patented camera positions there and accounted for. This is, however, not one of the director’s dreamlike and somewhat woozy films. One might even call it energetic for much of its running time, for there’s a sense of naturalism surrounding parts of the film that doesn’t suggest that we are partaking in parts of the dreams or nightmares of the director this time around but some of the things he sees when he wakes from them. Which obviously still means naked Lina Romay. Fitting to this mood is the absence of a big nightclub and strip sequence. Instead, the film features a short mock-Satanic ritual followed by a little orgy that nearly takes on the quality of sensual dream but never quite gets there; on purpose, if you ask me, for this film, at least in this version, isn’t as much about Franco indulging in his dreams than reflecting on their dark side.

Past Misdeeds: Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972)

aka The Corpse Packs His Bags

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A murderer with a very peculiar modus operandi haunts London. Concentrating on people visiting the fair city, he first packs his victims' bags, then kills them with an incredibly precise knife throw. As you do.

Inspector Ruppert Redford (Fred Williams) - oh, the hilarity! - of Scotland Yard has quite a bit of trouble solving the case. I'm sure his trouble has nothing at all to do with him being a typical early 70s smartass playboy who just loves to let civilians do his job for him, like the (weirdly competent, obviously odious) comic relief photographer Andy Pickwick (Luis Morris) or his personal friend, the crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert).

To be fair to Redford, one has to admit the case is rather complicated, seeing as it not only involves the strange murders, but also a shady doctor (Siegfried Schürenberg) with more than just one secret, his lovely assistant (Elisa Montés) with another secret all her own, a drug ring peddling a drug thrice as potent as heroin, various bombings, one or more revenge plots, and Barton's secret. Not unlike Redford (who will solve his case by going where Pickwick tells him to, and being obnoxious), I lost track of the plot about halfway through the movie, and never was quite sure what was going on in some of the plot lines, so it's difficult to blame him.

Say what you will about German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner's attempts at jumping on the successful Edgar Wallace adaptation wagon by making a contract with Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace that allowed him to use the younger Wallace's name and the often very fine titles of the man's books and make completely unrelated films out of them, but the man did show good taste when it came to the international co-operations late in his Wallace Junior cycle. After having co-produced Argento's Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Brauner hired beloved auteur Jess Franco for his next Bryan Wallace movie, Brauner's second version of Wallace's Death Packs A Suitcase.

Now, I have gone on record saying that I generally prefer Franco's more personal films - at least when we're talking about his work of the 60s and 70s - to his attempts at making more conventional genre movies, but Der Todesrächer von Soho (which translates as "the death-avenger of Soho", and no, the word "Todesrächer" does exist in German as little as "death-avenger" does in English - it's just a lovely case of the sort of random composite noun the German language loves so dearly) turns out to be an exception to the rule, and may in fact be one of my personal favourites among Franco's films. It's probably because Franco might not have been allowed to indulge in his erotic obsessions as heavily as his fans are used to - well, beyond a very short nightclub sequence and a lot of women wearing boots, anyway - but does indulge heavily in his love of pulp and a visual and narrative style that have come down through the serials (on the visual side of course combined with the man's usual tics and enthusiasms).

While Der Todesrächer doesn't work at all as a straight pulpy narrative (what with it having a plot so byzantine my first viewing didn't even leave me with an understanding of the knife-thrower's motives, even though I guessed his identity without much trouble with his first appearance on screen), it's a virtual feast of classic pulp, serial, and krimi clichés as seen through the slightly skewed but loving perspective of Franco. The whole film is basically Franco shooting classic poses of the genres he's working in from his favourite weird perspectives and through glass tables while a pretty hip soundtrack by Rolf Kühn (with some contributions by Franco himself, apparently) plays, pretty obviously having a lot of fun with it and for once not even trying to achieve transcendence through boredom. In fact (and genre-appropriately), Der Todesrächer is as fast-paced and sprightly as a Franco movie gets, with nary a minute where nothing exciting or at least interesting is happening on screen, making this one a Franco movie that's much easier to appreciate for the amateur than his more self-indulgent films. How could I not appreciate Franco having fun in this way?

As much as I love the director, I usually do not use the word "exciting" to describe any of his films, but Der Todesrächer von Soho is an exception to that rule too, working as a timely reminder that Franco could be versatile if a given project interested him enough.


German viewers will probably have another reason to look fondly, or even with mild astonishment, at the film, for its use of Horst Tappert is quite an eye-opener. Here in Germany, Tappert is primarily known today as the star of the long-running (I thought about eighty years, Internet sources speak of only twenty-four) cop show Derrick. The show's complete run of 281 episodes was written by Herbert Reinecker whom you also might know as one of the core writers of Rialto Film's Edgar Wallace cycle (and yes, Tappert was in some of those too, and quite lively at that). Unfortunately, Reinecker's attempts at a more psychological crime show only resulted in a show as visually dead, emotionally and intellectually dull, and politically conservative as anything I'd care - or rather not care - to imagine, and drove Tappert to performances that would be cruel to call "wooden", for even pieces of wood have feelings that can be hurt. Having grown up with Derrick, and somewhat forgotten Tappert's part in the earlier Wallace movies, it came as a real shock to watch the actor here, about two years before he started on the show that was to make/end him, smiling, acting, even over-acting, and possessing an actual physical presence like, well, an actual human being, outplaying the film's cop character with effortless charisma. It's quite a thing to behold, though not enough for me to ever want to revisit Derrick.

On ExB: Cartes sur table (1966)

aka Attack of the Robots

In this night’s episode of Clash of the Titans, we’ll take a look at what happened when France’s second favourite American Eddie Constantine met my favourite Jess Franco.

It’s quite the thing, obviously, and you can, and most probably should, click on through to my words (possibly building sentences) about the film over at the not-at-all robotic Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,spanish movies,reviews,spies,eurospy,jess franco,françoise brion,eddie constantine,sophie hardy,comedy

On WTF: Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972)

aka The Corpse Packs His Bags

In my newly regained enthusiasm for watching Edgar Wallace adaptations, I've turned my eye to one of Artur Brauner's Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptations, in this particular case a Spanish co-production directed by the great, frightening Jess Franco.

It's Franco without the pubic hair zooms! What the great man put in their place, I'll relate over on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,spanish movies,jess franco,horst tappert,fred williams,elisa montes,reviews,krimi,other places

La Fille De Dracula (1972)

Luisa Karlstein (Britt Nichols) returns to her ancestral home for a deathbed visit with her mother(?)/grandmother(?) (Carmen Carbonell). Before she dies, the old lady asks Luisa to take a look into "the crypt below the tower", to "see what it is that is killing her", and because the first count who is buried there was a vampire. No, I don't know what that's supposed to be good for either.

Dutifully, Luisa wanders off to the crypt, whereupon a coffin swings open and the first Count Karlstein (Howard Vernon in his most comfy role) - or, following the pre-movie text card, Count Dracula - stares long and hard at the girl and hisses.

Afterwards, Luisa renews(?)/begins(?) a love affair with her cousin(?)/childhood friend(?) Karine (Anne Libert), which results in a bit of sex and some biting with the vampire fangs Luisa grows from time to time.

While that has been going on (though the first murder seems to have taken place before Luisa even arrived), the nude female population of the nearby town has been decimated by a mysterious bloodsucking killer. Like the audience, investigating Inspector Ptuschko (Alberto Dalbes) has no clue what's going on. That doesn't hinder him from being a condescending smartass to everyone, nor from randomly naming people as the killer without having much evidence for his theories. Among the Inspector's suspects is the not-undead Count Karlstein (Daniel White).

The Karlsteins' secretary Jefferson (Jess Franco himself) seems to know what's up with his employers' family, but he needs a bit of time before he goes from incoherent ramblings about the supernatural into vampire hunter mode.

If you don't already enjoy the films of Spanish exploitation auteur and fan of close-ups of female pubic hair Jess Franco, La Fille De Dracula will probably not teach you how to do it, containing as it does all the flaws of a typical early 70s film by the director and not as many of their virtues as one would wish for as one of the uninitiated. Once you have fallen in love with Franco's ways of doing thing like I have, you learn to just ignore his films' idiosyncrasies, go with the flow, and hope for another shot of random, strange beauty.

La Fille isn't making life easy for its viewers. I'm used to Franco's disinterest in narrative subtleties like a dramatic arc, characterisation, or just making plain the relationships between the characters, but even I found myself getting impatient with this particular film from time to time - a real problem given that La Fille, like all of Franco's movies, is paced at a tempo one might call - depending on one's temperament - "languid" or "snail-like". I'm okay with long stretches of movie where nothing at all is happening, as long as they are filled with enough Franco-isms to keep me awake, but it's exactly the scenes containing Franco's special obsessions - lesbian vampire sex, longish cameos by himself, weird artsy night club striptease scenes, long shots of the faces of his actresses or just a reflection the director is fascinated in - that don't seem to have quite the power here they have in the director's other films.

I'm obviously entering a realm here where it becomes difficult to quantify why this particular film's lesbian sex feels less weird and effective as that in Franco's other movies, or why this ultra-lazy (we never witness him actually getting out of his coffin) Howard Vernon vampire is less impressive than the actor's usual performances, or why a long shot of the reflection of a living room in a piano seems not quite as fascinating as usual; "it just feels this way" is the only - and unsatisfactory - explanation I have.

That doesn't mean that La Fille De Dracula is a film completely without merit for the Franco fanatic - we're going to watch anything with the man's name on it in any case - it's just a film that (to me) is not as fascinating and hypnotic as the director's movies can be.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,reviews,horror,jess franco,britt nichols,anne libert,howard vernon

Night of the Skull (1976)

"Louisiana" (Louisiana, Spain, I suppose) around the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th. A man in a skull latex mask murders Lord Archibald Marian (Antonio Mayans) in a rather cruel fashion.

Police Inspector Bore (Vicente Roca) is confronted with more suspects than anyone could reasonably cope with. There's the Lord's extra-marital daughter Rita (Lina Romay), living in his house as a punching bag for her father and his wife (Evelyne Scott), the rather mad servant Rufus (Luis Barboo) and so on and so on.

At the reading of the man's will it turns out Marian must have had some inkling of his coming death. At least there's no good reason anyone could think of why he should have made two testaments - one in case of a natural death and a different one in case he is murdered. The latter makes Rita his sole heir. This rather happy endy proposition is cut short by Bore, who'll have to check some things first before he lets the business proceed. To nobody's surprise, the murders continue, and the help of Scotland Yard's best man Major Brooks (Alberto Dalbes), the appearance of another, older testament with completely different contents (and no, I don't see why that should matter, but in the world of this film, it does), and the arrival of even more suspects/potential heirs/potential murder victims for the reading of the older/new/whatever will do nothing to make matters less complicated. Bore also beautifully follows the tradition of the Old Dark House school of mystery in his insistence of putting everyone together in the same place, so they are easier to find for the killer, um, because it's safer.

I have made my love for the lifework of Jess Franco clear enough in earlier write-ups, I think, but even I (someone who adores Oasis of the Zombies) can't bring myself to recommend Night of the Skull. The film's main problem is its genre, or rather the fact that the mystery genre is less than ideal for Franco's directorial strengths and deadly for its weaknesses. Even an Old Dark House Mystery needs a certain amount of internal logic; people just getting information without any explanation of where it comes from, or when and how it was acquired, as happens here repeatedly is to be avoided at all costs. There is also the problem of tension - Franco is always at his best when he can play loose with plot, action etc, while a mystery like this needs a certain amount of tightness and a sort of tension Franco is not used to provide.

The film is not all bad, though. It looks at times delightful. It also has some moments of typical Franco hypnotism and it is always a pleasure to watch an ensemble of favorite Franco actors doing their thing. The problem is just that Franco is never at his best when he is trying to be conventional. (And, I have to ask, what's with the lack of nightclub sequences and sleaze?)

Oh, this is also the only film I know of that is based on "Edgar Allen Poe's The Cat And The Canary", probably the best book never written.

 

Technorati-Tags: spanish movies,jess franco,lina romay,antonio mayans,alberto dalbes,reviews,mystery

Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1971)

At the moment of their triumph, Doctor Frankenstein (Dennis Price) and his assistant Morpho (Jess Franco himself, shaggy as always), are attacked and killed by Melissa (Anne Libert). This cloaked and mostly naked woman was - as we will later learn - born from the unholy combination of bird's egg and human sperm, a fact that explains the feathers placed on strategic places of her body and her claws as well as the cries of bird imitation coming from the film's soundtrack whenever she gets excited. I don't know about the cat sounds, her blindness or her sexualized appetite for cannibalism, though. Is it still cannibalism if the perpetrator is a bird woman?

The bird woman and an unnamed assistant have come to steal the Doctor's freshly perfected monster (Fernando Bilbao, sporting a look, but unfortunately not an acting ability, relatively close to Universal's Karloff incarnation - painted silver) for their master, the reincarnated magnetist Cagliostro (Howard Vernon). Cagliostro plans to use the monster to abduct women whom he'll then use to get the raw parts for the creation of the perfect woman he needs to breed a master race that will destroy mankind. The monster is also the chosen father of the new race, by the way.

Fortunately, Frankenstein wasn't quite dead when Melissa left him, so he has ample time to ramble on and on about his monster, evil and so on, begging his friend Doctor Seward (Alberto Dalbes) to put things right again, without going into any details before finally really dying and leaving Seward rather puzzled.

The dead Frankenstein's tendency to ramble on and on is something his daughter Vera (Beatriz Savon) - also a remarkable expert in mad science - will learn to hate. Although she's able to revive her old man for short times with an electro-magnetic gadget, it takes more than one try to get more information about his enemy out of him than long-winded rambling about said enemy's evilness and madness (and that from a guy who invented a silver monster).

She should have spared herself the stress, because the monster abducts her soon enough.

A session of Melissa ranting semi-religious sounding explanations of "the master's" will and Cagliostro staring bug-eyed later, Vera is under his mesmeric control. Now the only thing that stands between mankind and a cult of undead created by Cagliostro (reaching from the Halloween-masked to the plastic skeleton to a guy with pointy ears) is Doctor Seward. Oh dear.

 

Too many people still dislike Jess Franco's films, find them boring and illogical and call him a hack. One could get angry about it, if not for the fact that those Franco distractors are too be pitied for the things they are missing.

The fun with Erotic Rites of Frankenstein already starts when you are trying to find out which cut of it you have in front of you. Is it the normal European version with quite a bit of nakedness? Or the Spanish version, having clothes inserted where none belongs, and gifted with the first foray of Lina Romay into Franco's world in form of some rather pointless interludes that don't seem to have anything to do with the main plot (whatever this means in this case)? Or the naughty version for the naughty French with the naughty pornographic bits? In my case, it's the main European version, which is also supposed to be the best one.

And an excellent one it most certainly is. It's beautiful to look at if you come to with an open mind and it's also full of the dream-logic that is at the core of Franco's best work and made as hypnotic as Vernon is supposed to be by Franco's singular and strange brand of eroticism. It often seems to me here as if even Franco's well-known method (or tic, if you are unkind) of suddenly letting his camera rest for a stretch of time on some inanimate object has little to do with him getting distracted, as is often said, but more with him sexualizing objects in the same way he is sexualizing people.

This mood is par for the course in Franco's body of work, as is the pointlessness of the plot or the strange, anti-naturalistic way the man lets his actors do their work (just watch Anne Libert's fantastic/completely unhinged performance!). What's not so typical for a Franco film is the surprising amount of silliness here - there's always something happening (even if what is happening does not necessarily make any sense) and it is never quite clear how much of it you are meant to take at face value. The script seems to stem from the same kind of pulp sensibility that can be found in Paul Naschy's work, just realized here in a much more creative (and let's be honest: not boring) way.

If it weren't as obscure as it is, I'd recommend Erotic Rites of Frankenstein as a fine introduction to Franco's work. It's a treat in any case.

 

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